Search-and-rescue volunteers had to rely on sense of smell to find bodies in Texas flood debris, one reveals

Volunteers combing through debris piles from the devastating Central Texas flooding had to sniff out decaying bodies in the “chaotic” initial days of the search-and-rescue efforts.

Ryan Logue, a resident of Kerrville, Texas, jumped to volunteer with the United Cajun Navy, a search-and-rescue nonprofit, as the floodwaters consumed the communities around him.

He said the first days of the efforts were challenging as volunteers tried to sift through miles of heavy debris in the Guadalupe River for the missing without the help of cadaver dogs.

“You’d be on a 100-yard stretch of the river out in the middle of it, and there would be 2,500 piles within a hundred yards of it’d be one cedar tree covered in debris. You can walk by and visually inspect it, but you couldn’t get eyes inside of the pile,” Logue recalled.

“You’d have to base it off possibly smelling decomposition if there is a corpse, if there’s a cadaver in there or you just have to wait till it does start heating up and you do get that more of the cadaver dogs in there, but those first couple of days it was so chaotic and nobody knew what was going on,” he added.

At least 120 people have been confirmed dead after the flash floods hit the region, according to local law enforcement and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. Another 173 people are unaccounted for.

Logue contacted the United Cajun Navy as the floodwaters took hold of his community and began recruiting a team of volunteers to search for the missing in his own backyard.

“It’s gonna be victims that we’re finding. It gets overwhelming thinking about all of it,” a tearful Logue told CNN.

“I care about these people so much that I will figure out whatever I have to do for their families to get closure,” he added.

The Kerrville resident said the effort has taken its toll as he’s found dozens of personal belongings from the little girls who attended Camp Mystic, a Christian summer camp along the Guadalupe River where 27 children and staff members died in the flooding.

As a father of a 7-year-old girl, Logue has found it difficult to separate himself from the tragedy.

“When you find people’s personal items, they’ve got names in them. I found a young girl’s Bible, it had her handwriting in there with all of her favorite scripture … and that takes as much of a toll on you over time as finding a body does because those are the same memories the body holds.”

The Guadalupe River rose over 26 feet in under an hour, slightly outdoing the 1987 floods that swept through the Texas hill country.

And search-and-rescue teams have only scratched the surface of the destruction, according to Logue.

“There’s no way to tell how long this is going to take … It’s a 100-mile strip of the Guadalupe. Some places it’s 75 yards wide, some places it’s a mile wide of destruction.”